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Thursday, May 12, 2022

Deep learning

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Representing images on multiple layers of abstraction in deep learning
Representing images on multiple layers of abstraction in deep learning
 

Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised.

Deep-learning architectures such as deep neural networks, deep belief networks, deep reinforcement learning, recurrent neural networks and convolutional neural networks have been applied to fields including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, machine translation, bioinformatics, drug design, medical image analysis, climate science, material inspection and board game programs, where they have produced results comparable to and in some cases surpassing human expert performance.

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) were inspired by information processing and distributed communication nodes in biological systems. ANNs have various differences from biological brains. Specifically, artificial neural networks tend to be static and symbolic, while the biological brain of most living organisms is dynamic (plastic) and analogue.

The adjective "deep" in deep learning refers to the use of multiple layers in the network. Early work showed that a linear perceptron cannot be a universal classifier, but that a network with a nonpolynomial activation function with one hidden layer of unbounded width can. Deep learning is a modern variation which is concerned with an unbounded number of layers of bounded size, which permits practical application and optimized implementation, while retaining theoretical universality under mild conditions. In deep learning the layers are also permitted to be heterogeneous and to deviate widely from biologically informed connectionist models, for the sake of efficiency, trainability and understandability, whence the "structured" part.

Definition

Deep learning is a class of machine learning algorithms that uses multiple layers to progressively extract higher-level features from the raw input. For example, in image processing, lower layers may identify edges, while higher layers may identify the concepts relevant to a human such as digits or letters or faces.

Overview

Most modern deep learning models are based on artificial neural networks, specifically convolutional neural networks (CNN)s, although they can also include propositional formulas or latent variables organized layer-wise in deep generative models such as the nodes in deep belief networks and deep Boltzmann machines.

In deep learning, each level learns to transform its input data into a slightly more abstract and composite representation. In an image recognition application, the raw input may be a matrix of pixels; the first representational layer may abstract the pixels and encode edges; the second layer may compose and encode arrangements of edges; the third layer may encode a nose and eyes; and the fourth layer may recognize that the image contains a face. Importantly, a deep learning process can learn which features to optimally place in which level on its own. This does not eliminate the need for hand-tuning; for example, varying numbers of layers and layer sizes can provide different degrees of abstraction.

The word "deep" in "deep learning" refers to the number of layers through which the data is transformed. More precisely, deep learning systems have a substantial credit assignment path (CAP) depth. The CAP is the chain of transformations from input to output. CAPs describe potentially causal connections between input and output. For a feedforward neural network, the depth of the CAPs is that of the network and is the number of hidden layers plus one (as the output layer is also parameterized). For recurrent neural networks, in which a signal may propagate through a layer more than once, the CAP depth is potentially unlimited. No universally agreed-upon threshold of depth divides shallow learning from deep learning, but most researchers agree that deep learning involves CAP depth higher than 2. CAP of depth 2 has been shown to be a universal approximator in the sense that it can emulate any function. Beyond that, more layers do not add to the function approximator ability of the network. Deep models (CAP > 2) are able to extract better features than shallow models and hence, extra layers help in learning the features effectively.

Deep learning architectures can be constructed with a greedy layer-by-layer method. Deep learning helps to disentangle these abstractions and pick out which features improve performance.

For supervised learning tasks, deep learning methods eliminate feature engineering, by translating the data into compact intermediate representations akin to principal components, and derive layered structures that remove redundancy in representation.

Deep learning algorithms can be applied to unsupervised learning tasks. This is an important benefit because unlabeled data are more abundant than the labeled data. Examples of deep structures that can be trained in an unsupervised manner are deep belief networks.

Interpretations

Deep neural networks are generally interpreted in terms of the universal approximation theorem or probabilistic inference.

The classic universal approximation theorem concerns the capacity of feedforward neural networks with a single hidden layer of finite size to approximate continuous functions. In 1989, the first proof was published by George Cybenko for sigmoid activation functions and was generalised to feed-forward multi-layer architectures in 1991 by Kurt Hornik. Recent work also showed that universal approximation also holds for non-bounded activation functions such as the rectified linear unit.

The universal approximation theorem for deep neural networks concerns the capacity of networks with bounded width but the depth is allowed to grow. Lu et al. proved that if the width of a deep neural network with ReLU activation is strictly larger than the input dimension, then the network can approximate any Lebesgue integrable function; If the width is smaller or equal to the input dimension, then a deep neural network is not a universal approximator.

The probabilistic interpretation derives from the field of machine learning. It features inference, as well as the optimization concepts of training and testing, related to fitting and generalization, respectively. More specifically, the probabilistic interpretation considers the activation nonlinearity as a cumulative distribution function. The probabilistic interpretation led to the introduction of dropout as regularizer in neural networks. The probabilistic interpretation was introduced by researchers including Hopfield, Widrow and Narendra and popularized in surveys such as the one by Bishop.

History

Some sources point out that Frank Rosenblatt developed and explored all of the basic ingredients of the deep learning systems of today. He described it in his book "Principles of Neurodynamics: Perceptrons and the Theory of Brain Mechanisms", published by Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, Inc., Cornell University in 1962.

The first general, working learning algorithm for supervised, deep, feedforward, multilayer perceptrons was published by Alexey Ivakhnenko and Lapa in 1967. A 1971 paper described a deep network with eight layers trained by the group method of data handling. Other deep learning working architectures, specifically those built for computer vision, began with the Neocognitron introduced by Kunihiko Fukushima in 1980.

The term Deep Learning was introduced to the machine learning community by Rina Dechter in 1986, and to artificial neural networks by Igor Aizenberg and colleagues in 2000, in the context of Boolean threshold neurons.

In 1989, Yann LeCun et al. applied the standard backpropagation algorithm, which had been around as the reverse mode of automatic differentiation since 1970, to a deep neural network with the purpose of recognizing handwritten ZIP codes on mail. While the algorithm worked, training required 3 days.

In 1994, André de Carvalho, together with Mike Fairhurst and David Bisset, published experimental results of a multi-layer boolean neural network, also known as a weightless neural network, composed of a 3-layers self-organising feature extraction neural network module (SOFT) followed by a multi-layer classification neural network module (GSN), which were independently trained. Each layer in the feature extraction module extracted features with growing complexity regarding the previous layer.

In 1995, Brendan Frey demonstrated that it was possible to train (over two days) a network containing six fully connected layers and several hundred hidden units using the wake-sleep algorithm, co-developed with Peter Dayan and Hinton. Many factors contribute to the slow speed, including the vanishing gradient problem analyzed in 1991 by Sepp Hochreiter.

Since 1997, Sven Behnke extended the feed-forward hierarchical convolutional approach in the Neural Abstraction Pyramid by lateral and backward connections in order to flexibly incorporate context into decisions and iteratively resolve local ambiguities.

Simpler models that use task-specific handcrafted features such as Gabor filters and support vector machines (SVMs) were a popular choice in the 1990s and 2000s, because of artificial neural network's (ANN) computational cost and a lack of understanding of how the brain wires its biological networks.

Both shallow and deep learning (e.g., recurrent nets) of ANNs have been explored for many years. These methods never outperformed non-uniform internal-handcrafting Gaussian mixture model/Hidden Markov model (GMM-HMM) technology based on generative models of speech trained discriminatively. Key difficulties have been analyzed, including gradient diminishing and weak temporal correlation structure in neural predictive models. Additional difficulties were the lack of training data and limited computing power.

Most speech recognition researchers moved away from neural nets to pursue generative modeling. An exception was at SRI International in the late 1990s. Funded by the US government's NSA and DARPA, SRI studied deep neural networks in speech and speaker recognition. The speaker recognition team led by Larry Heck reported significant success with deep neural networks in speech processing in the 1998 National Institute of Standards and Technology Speaker Recognition evaluation. The SRI deep neural network was then deployed in the Nuance Verifier, representing the first major industrial application of deep learning.

The principle of elevating "raw" features over hand-crafted optimization was first explored successfully in the architecture of deep autoencoder on the "raw" spectrogram or linear filter-bank features in the late 1990s, showing its superiority over the Mel-Cepstral features that contain stages of fixed transformation from spectrograms. The raw features of speech, waveforms, later produced excellent larger-scale results.

Many aspects of speech recognition were taken over by a deep learning method called long short-term memory (LSTM), a recurrent neural network published by Hochreiter and Schmidhuber in 1997. LSTM RNNs avoid the vanishing gradient problem and can learn "Very Deep Learning" tasks that require memories of events that happened thousands of discrete time steps before, which is important for speech. In 2003, LSTM started to become competitive with traditional speech recognizers on certain tasks. Later it was combined with connectionist temporal classification (CTC) in stacks of LSTM RNNs. In 2015, Google's speech recognition reportedly experienced a dramatic performance jump of 49% through CTC-trained LSTM, which they made available through Google Voice Search.

In 2006, publications by Geoff Hinton, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Osindero and Teh showed how a many-layered feedforward neural network could be effectively pre-trained one layer at a time, treating each layer in turn as an unsupervised restricted Boltzmann machine, then fine-tuning it using supervised backpropagation. The papers referred to learning for deep belief nets.

Deep learning is part of state-of-the-art systems in various disciplines, particularly computer vision and automatic speech recognition (ASR). Results on commonly used evaluation sets such as TIMIT (ASR) and MNIST (image classification), as well as a range of large-vocabulary speech recognition tasks have steadily improved. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) were superseded for ASR by CTC for LSTM. but are more successful in computer vision.

The impact of deep learning in industry began in the early 2000s, when CNNs already processed an estimated 10% to 20% of all the checks written in the US, according to Yann LeCun. Industrial applications of deep learning to large-scale speech recognition started around 2010.

The 2009 NIPS Workshop on Deep Learning for Speech Recognition was motivated by the limitations of deep generative models of speech, and the possibility that given more capable hardware and large-scale data sets that deep neural nets (DNN) might become practical. It was believed that pre-training DNNs using generative models of deep belief nets (DBN) would overcome the main difficulties of neural nets. However, it was discovered that replacing pre-training with large amounts of training data for straightforward backpropagation when using DNNs with large, context-dependent output layers produced error rates dramatically lower than then-state-of-the-art Gaussian mixture model (GMM)/Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and also than more-advanced generative model-based systems. The nature of the recognition errors produced by the two types of systems was characteristically different, offering technical insights into how to integrate deep learning into the existing highly efficient, run-time speech decoding system deployed by all major speech recognition systems. Analysis around 2009–2010, contrasting the GMM (and other generative speech models) vs. DNN models, stimulated early industrial investment in deep learning for speech recognition, eventually leading to pervasive and dominant use in that industry. That analysis was done with comparable performance (less than 1.5% in error rate) between discriminative DNNs and generative models.

In 2010, researchers extended deep learning from TIMIT to large vocabulary speech recognition, by adopting large output layers of the DNN based on context-dependent HMM states constructed by decision trees.

Advances in hardware have driven renewed interest in deep learning. In 2009, Nvidia was involved in what was called the “big bang” of deep learning, “as deep-learning neural networks were trained with Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs).” That year, Andrew Ng determined that GPUs could increase the speed of deep-learning systems by about 100 times. In particular, GPUs are well-suited for the matrix/vector computations involved in machine learning. GPUs speed up training algorithms by orders of magnitude, reducing running times from weeks to days. Further, specialized hardware and algorithm optimizations can be used for efficient processing of deep learning models.

Deep learning revolution

How deep learning is a subset of machine learning and how machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence (AI).

In 2012, a team led by George E. Dahl won the "Merck Molecular Activity Challenge" using multi-task deep neural networks to predict the biomolecular target of one drug. In 2014, Hochreiter's group used deep learning to detect off-target and toxic effects of environmental chemicals in nutrients, household products and drugs and won the "Tox21 Data Challenge" of NIH, FDA and NCATS.

Significant additional impacts in image or object recognition were felt from 2011 to 2012. Although CNNs trained by backpropagation had been around for decades, and GPU implementations of NNs for years, including CNNs, fast implementations of CNNs on GPUs were needed to progress on computer vision. In 2011, this approach achieved for the first time superhuman performance in a visual pattern recognition contest. Also in 2011, it won the ICDAR Chinese handwriting contest, and in May 2012, it won the ISBI image segmentation contest. Until 2011, CNNs did not play a major role at computer vision conferences, but in June 2012, a paper by Ciresan et al. at the leading conference CVPR showed how max-pooling CNNs on GPU can dramatically improve many vision benchmark records. In October 2012, a similar system by Krizhevsky et al. won the large-scale ImageNet competition by a significant margin over shallow machine learning methods. In November 2012, Ciresan et al.'s system also won the ICPR contest on analysis of large medical images for cancer detection, and in the following year also the MICCAI Grand Challenge on the same topic. In 2013 and 2014, the error rate on the ImageNet task using deep learning was further reduced, following a similar trend in large-scale speech recognition.

Image classification was then extended to the more challenging task of generating descriptions (captions) for images, often as a combination of CNNs and LSTMs.

Some researchers state that the October 2012 ImageNet victory anchored the start of a "deep learning revolution" that has transformed the AI industry.

In March 2019, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun were awarded the Turing Award for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.

Neural networks

Artificial neural networks

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) or connectionist systems are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. Such systems learn (progressively improve their ability) to do tasks by considering examples, generally without task-specific programming. For example, in image recognition, they might learn to identify images that contain cats by analyzing example images that have been manually labeled as "cat" or "no cat" and using the analytic results to identify cats in other images. They have found most use in applications difficult to express with a traditional computer algorithm using rule-based programming.

An ANN is based on a collection of connected units called artificial neurons, (analogous to biological neurons in a biological brain). Each connection (synapse) between neurons can transmit a signal to another neuron. The receiving (postsynaptic) neuron can process the signal(s) and then signal downstream neurons connected to it. Neurons may have state, generally represented by real numbers, typically between 0 and 1. Neurons and synapses may also have a weight that varies as learning proceeds, which can increase or decrease the strength of the signal that it sends downstream.

Typically, neurons are organized in layers. Different layers may perform different kinds of transformations on their inputs. Signals travel from the first (input), to the last (output) layer, possibly after traversing the layers multiple times.

The original goal of the neural network approach was to solve problems in the same way that a human brain would. Over time, attention focused on matching specific mental abilities, leading to deviations from biology such as backpropagation, or passing information in the reverse direction and adjusting the network to reflect that information.

Neural networks have been used on a variety of tasks, including computer vision, speech recognition, machine translation, social network filtering, playing board and video games and medical diagnosis.

As of 2017, neural networks typically have a few thousand to a few million units and millions of connections. Despite this number being several order of magnitude less than the number of neurons on a human brain, these networks can perform many tasks at a level beyond that of humans (e.g., recognizing faces, playing "Go").

Deep neural networks

A deep neural network (DNN) is an artificial neural network (ANN) with multiple layers between the input and output layers. There are different types of neural networks but they always consist of the same components: neurons, synapses, weights, biases, and functions. These components functioning similar to the human brains and can be trained like any other ML algorithm.

For example, a DNN that is trained to recognize dog breeds will go over the given image and calculate the probability that the dog in the image is a certain breed. The user can review the results and select which probabilities the network should display (above a certain threshold, etc.) and return the proposed label. Each mathematical manipulation as such is considered a layer, and complex DNN have many layers, hence the name "deep" networks.

DNNs can model complex non-linear relationships. DNN architectures generate compositional models where the object is expressed as a layered composition of primitives. The extra layers enable composition of features from lower layers, potentially modeling complex data with fewer units than a similarly performing shallow network. For instance, it was proved that sparse multivariate polynomials are exponentially easier to approximate with DNNs than with shallow networks.

Deep architectures include many variants of a few basic approaches. Each architecture has found success in specific domains. It is not always possible to compare the performance of multiple architectures, unless they have been evaluated on the same data sets.

DNNs are typically feedforward networks in which data flows from the input layer to the output layer without looping back. At first, the DNN creates a map of virtual neurons and assigns random numerical values, or "weights", to connections between them. The weights and inputs are multiplied and return an output between 0 and 1. If the network did not accurately recognize a particular pattern, an algorithm would adjust the weights. That way the algorithm can make certain parameters more influential, until it determines the correct mathematical manipulation to fully process the data.

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs), in which data can flow in any direction, are used for applications such as language modeling. Long short-term memory is particularly effective for this use.

Convolutional deep neural networks (CNNs) are used in computer vision. CNNs also have been applied to acoustic modeling for automatic speech recognition (ASR).

Challenges

As with ANNs, many issues can arise with naively trained DNNs. Two common issues are overfitting and computation time.

DNNs are prone to overfitting because of the added layers of abstraction, which allow them to model rare dependencies in the training data. Regularization methods such as Ivakhnenko's unit pruning or weight decay (-regularization) or sparsity (-regularization) can be applied during training to combat overfitting. Alternatively dropout regularization randomly omits units from the hidden layers during training. This helps to exclude rare dependencies. Finally, data can be augmented via methods such as cropping and rotating such that smaller training sets can be increased in size to reduce the chances of overfitting.

DNNs must consider many training parameters, such as the size (number of layers and number of units per layer), the learning rate, and initial weights. Sweeping through the parameter space for optimal parameters may not be feasible due to the cost in time and computational resources. Various tricks, such as batching (computing the gradient on several training examples at once rather than individual examples) speed up computation. Large processing capabilities of many-core architectures (such as GPUs or the Intel Xeon Phi) have produced significant speedups in training, because of the suitability of such processing architectures for the matrix and vector computations.

Alternatively, engineers may look for other types of neural networks with more straightforward and convergent training algorithms. CMAC (cerebellar model articulation controller) is one such kind of neural network. It doesn't require learning rates or randomized initial weights for CMAC. The training process can be guaranteed to converge in one step with a new batch of data, and the computational complexity of the training algorithm is linear with respect to the number of neurons involved.

Hardware

Since the 2010s, advances in both machine learning algorithms and computer hardware have led to more efficient methods for training deep neural networks that contain many layers of non-linear hidden units and a very large output layer. By 2019, graphic processing units (GPUs), often with AI-specific enhancements, had displaced CPUs as the dominant method of training large-scale commercial cloud AI. OpenAI estimated the hardware computation used in the largest deep learning projects from AlexNet (2012) to AlphaZero (2017), and found a 300,000-fold increase in the amount of computation required, with a doubling-time trendline of 3.4 months.

Special electronic circuits called deep learning processors were designed to speed up deep learning algorithms. Deep learning processors include neural processing units (NPUs) in Huawei cellphones and cloud computing servers such as tensor processing units (TPU) in the Google Cloud Platform.

Atomically thin semiconductors are considered promising for energy-efficient deep learning hardware where the same basic device structure is used for both logic operations and data storage. In 2020, Marega et al. published experiments with a large-area active channel material for developing logic-in-memory devices and circuits based on floating-gate field-effect transistors (FGFETs).

In 2021, J. Feldmann et al. proposed an integrated photonic hardware accelerator for parallel convolutional processing. The authors identify two key advantages of integrated photonics over its electronic counterparts: (1) massively parallel data transfer through wavelength division multiplexing in conjunction with frequency combs, and (2) extremely high data modulation speeds. Their system can execute trillions of multiply-accumulate operations per second, indicating the potential of integrated photonics in data-heavy AI applications.

Applications

Automatic speech recognition

Large-scale automatic speech recognition is the first and most convincing successful case of deep learning. LSTM RNNs can learn "Very Deep Learning" tasks that involve multi-second intervals containing speech events separated by thousands of discrete time steps, where one time step corresponds to about 10 ms. LSTM with forget gates is competitive with traditional speech recognizers on certain tasks.

The initial success in speech recognition was based on small-scale recognition tasks based on TIMIT. The data set contains 630 speakers from eight major dialects of American English, where each speaker reads 10 sentences. Its small size lets many configurations be tried. More importantly, the TIMIT task concerns phone-sequence recognition, which, unlike word-sequence recognition, allows weak phone bigram language models. This lets the strength of the acoustic modeling aspects of speech recognition be more easily analyzed. The error rates listed below, including these early results and measured as percent phone error rates (PER), have been summarized since 1991.

Method Percent phone
error rate (PER) (%)
Randomly Initialized RNN 26.1
Bayesian Triphone GMM-HMM 25.6
Hidden Trajectory (Generative) Model 24.8
Monophone Randomly Initialized DNN 23.4
Monophone DBN-DNN 22.4
Triphone GMM-HMM with BMMI Training 21.7
Monophone DBN-DNN on fbank 20.7
Convolutional DNN 20.0
Convolutional DNN w. Heterogeneous Pooling 18.7
Ensemble DNN/CNN/RNN 18.3
Bidirectional LSTM 17.8
Hierarchical Convolutional Deep Maxout Network 16.5

The debut of DNNs for speaker recognition in the late 1990s and speech recognition around 2009-2011 and of LSTM around 2003–2007, accelerated progress in eight major areas:

  • Scale-up/out and accelerated DNN training and decoding
  • Sequence discriminative training
  • Feature processing by deep models with solid understanding of the underlying mechanisms
  • Adaptation of DNNs and related deep models
  • Multi-task and transfer learning by DNNs and related deep models
  • CNNs and how to design them to best exploit domain knowledge of speech
  • RNN and its rich LSTM variants
  • Other types of deep models including tensor-based models and integrated deep generative/discriminative models.

All major commercial speech recognition systems (e.g., Microsoft Cortana, Xbox, Skype Translator, Amazon Alexa, Google Now, Apple Siri, Baidu and iFlyTek voice search, and a range of Nuance speech products, etc.) are based on deep learning.

Image recognition

A common evaluation set for image classification is the MNIST database data set. MNIST is composed of handwritten digits and includes 60,000 training examples and 10,000 test examples. As with TIMIT, its small size lets users test multiple configurations. A comprehensive list of results on this set is available.

Deep learning-based image recognition has become "superhuman", producing more accurate results than human contestants. This first occurred in 2011 in recognition of traffic signs, and in 2014, with recognition of human faces.

Deep learning-trained vehicles now interpret 360° camera views. Another example is Facial Dysmorphology Novel Analysis (FDNA) used to analyze cases of human malformation connected to a large database of genetic syndromes.

Visual art processing

Closely related to the progress that has been made in image recognition is the increasing application of deep learning techniques to various visual art tasks. DNNs have proven themselves capable, for example, of

  • identifying the style period of a given painting
  • Neural Style Transfer – capturing the style of a given artwork and applying it in a visually pleasing manner to an arbitrary photograph or video
  • generating striking imagery based on random visual input fields.

Natural language processing

Neural networks have been used for implementing language models since the early 2000s. LSTM helped to improve machine translation and language modeling.

Other key techniques in this field are negative sampling and word embedding. Word embedding, such as word2vec, can be thought of as a representational layer in a deep learning architecture that transforms an atomic word into a positional representation of the word relative to other words in the dataset; the position is represented as a point in a vector space. Using word embedding as an RNN input layer allows the network to parse sentences and phrases using an effective compositional vector grammar. A compositional vector grammar can be thought of as probabilistic context free grammar (PCFG) implemented by an RNN. Recursive auto-encoders built atop word embeddings can assess sentence similarity and detect paraphrasing. Deep neural architectures provide the best results for constituency parsing, sentiment analysis, information retrieval, spoken language understanding, machine translation, contextual entity linking, writing style recognition, Text classification and others.

Recent developments generalize word embedding to sentence embedding.

Google Translate (GT) uses a large end-to-end long short-term memory (LSTM) network. Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) uses an example-based machine translation method in which the system "learns from millions of examples." It translates "whole sentences at a time, rather than pieces. Google Translate supports over one hundred languages. The network encodes the "semantics of the sentence rather than simply memorizing phrase-to-phrase translations". GT uses English as an intermediate between most language pairs.

Drug discovery and toxicology

A large percentage of candidate drugs fail to win regulatory approval. These failures are caused by insufficient efficacy (on-target effect), undesired interactions (off-target effects), or unanticipated toxic effects. Research has explored use of deep learning to predict the biomolecular targets, off-targets, and toxic effects of environmental chemicals in nutrients, household products and drugs.

AtomNet is a deep learning system for structure-based rational drug design. AtomNet was used to predict novel candidate biomolecules for disease targets such as the Ebola virus and multiple sclerosis.

In 2017 graph neural networks were used for the first time to predict various properties of molecules in a large toxicology data set. In 2019, generative neural networks were used to produce molecules that were validated experimentally all the way into mice.

Customer relationship management

Deep reinforcement learning has been used to approximate the value of possible direct marketing actions, defined in terms of RFM variables. The estimated value function was shown to have a natural interpretation as customer lifetime value.

Recommendation systems

Recommendation systems have used deep learning to extract meaningful features for a latent factor model for content-based music and journal recommendations. Multi-view deep learning has been applied for learning user preferences from multiple domains. The model uses a hybrid collaborative and content-based approach and enhances recommendations in multiple tasks.

Bioinformatics

An autoencoder ANN was used in bioinformatics, to predict gene ontology annotations and gene-function relationships.

In medical informatics, deep learning was used to predict sleep quality based on data from wearables and predictions of health complications from electronic health record data.

Medical image analysis

Deep learning has been shown to produce competitive results in medical application such as cancer cell classification, lesion detection, organ segmentation and image enhancement. Modern deep learning tools demonstrate the high accuracy of detecting various diseases and the helpfulness of their use by specialists to improve the diagnosis efficiency.

Mobile advertising

Finding the appropriate mobile audience for mobile advertising is always challenging, since many data points must be considered and analyzed before a target segment can be created and used in ad serving by any ad server. Deep learning has been used to interpret large, many-dimensioned advertising datasets. Many data points are collected during the request/serve/click internet advertising cycle. This information can form the basis of machine learning to improve ad selection.

Image restoration

Deep learning has been successfully applied to inverse problems such as denoising, super-resolution, inpainting, and film colorization. These applications include learning methods such as "Shrinkage Fields for Effective Image Restoration" which trains on an image dataset, and Deep Image Prior, which trains on the image that needs restoration.

Financial fraud detection

Deep learning is being successfully applied to financial fraud detection, tax evasion detection, and anti-money laundering.

Military

The United States Department of Defense applied deep learning to train robots in new tasks through observation.

Partial differential equations

Physics informed neural networks have been used to solve partial differential equations in both forward and inverse problems in a data driven manner. One example is the reconstructing fluid flow governed by the Navier-Stokes equations. Using physics informed neural networks does not require the often expensive mesh generation that conventional CFD methods relies on.

Image Reconstruction

Image reconstruction is the reconstruction of the underlying images from the image-related measurements. Several works showed the better and superior performance of the deep learning methods compared to analytical methods for various applications, e.g., spectral imaging and ultrasound imaging.

Relation to human cognitive and brain development

Deep learning is closely related to a class of theories of brain development (specifically, neocortical development) proposed by cognitive neuroscientists in the early 1990s. These developmental theories were instantiated in computational models, making them predecessors of deep learning systems. These developmental models share the property that various proposed learning dynamics in the brain (e.g., a wave of nerve growth factor) support the self-organization somewhat analogous to the neural networks utilized in deep learning models. Like the neocortex, neural networks employ a hierarchy of layered filters in which each layer considers information from a prior layer (or the operating environment), and then passes its output (and possibly the original input), to other layers. This process yields a self-organizing stack of transducers, well-tuned to their operating environment. A 1995 description stated, "...the infant's brain seems to organize itself under the influence of waves of so-called trophic-factors ... different regions of the brain become connected sequentially, with one layer of tissue maturing before another and so on until the whole brain is mature."

A variety of approaches have been used to investigate the plausibility of deep learning models from a neurobiological perspective. On the one hand, several variants of the backpropagation algorithm have been proposed in order to increase its processing realism. Other researchers have argued that unsupervised forms of deep learning, such as those based on hierarchical generative models and deep belief networks, may be closer to biological reality. In this respect, generative neural network models have been related to neurobiological evidence about sampling-based processing in the cerebral cortex.

Although a systematic comparison between the human brain organization and the neuronal encoding in deep networks has not yet been established, several analogies have been reported. For example, the computations performed by deep learning units could be similar to those of actual neurons and neural populations. Similarly, the representations developed by deep learning models are similar to those measured in the primate visual system both at the single-unit and at the population levels.

Commercial activity

Facebook's AI lab performs tasks such as automatically tagging uploaded pictures with the names of the people in them.

Google's DeepMind Technologies developed a system capable of learning how to play Atari video games using only pixels as data input. In 2015 they demonstrated their AlphaGo system, which learned the game of Go well enough to beat a professional Go player. Google Translate uses a neural network to translate between more than 100 languages.

In 2017, Covariant.ai was launched, which focuses on integrating deep learning into factories.

As of 2008, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin (UT) developed a machine learning framework called Training an Agent Manually via Evaluative Reinforcement, or TAMER, which proposed new methods for robots or computer programs to learn how to perform tasks by interacting with a human instructor. First developed as TAMER, a new algorithm called Deep TAMER was later introduced in 2018 during a collaboration between U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and UT researchers. Deep TAMER used deep learning to provide a robot the ability to learn new tasks through observation. Using Deep TAMER, a robot learned a task with a human trainer, watching video streams or observing a human perform a task in-person. The robot later practiced the task with the help of some coaching from the trainer, who provided feedback such as “good job” and “bad job.”

Criticism and comment

Deep learning has attracted both criticism and comment, in some cases from outside the field of computer science.

Theory

A main criticism concerns the lack of theory surrounding some methods. Learning in the most common deep architectures is implemented using well-understood gradient descent. However, the theory surrounding other algorithms, such as contrastive divergence is less clear. (e.g., Does it converge? If so, how fast? What is it approximating?) Deep learning methods are often looked at as a black box, with most confirmations done empirically, rather than theoretically.

Others point out that deep learning should be looked at as a step towards realizing strong AI, not as an all-encompassing solution. Despite the power of deep learning methods, they still lack much of the functionality needed for realizing this goal entirely. Research psychologist Gary Marcus noted:

"Realistically, deep learning is only part of the larger challenge of building intelligent machines. Such techniques lack ways of representing causal relationships (...) have no obvious ways of performing logical inferences, and they are also still a long way from integrating abstract knowledge, such as information about what objects are, what they are for, and how they are typically used. The most powerful A.I. systems, like Watson (...) use techniques like deep learning as just one element in a very complicated ensemble of techniques, ranging from the statistical technique of Bayesian inference to deductive reasoning."

In further reference to the idea that artistic sensitivity might be inherent in relatively low levels of the cognitive hierarchy, a published series of graphic representations of the internal states of deep (20-30 layers) neural networks attempting to discern within essentially random data the images on which they were trained demonstrate a visual appeal: the original research notice received well over 1,000 comments, and was the subject of what was for a time the most frequently accessed article on The Guardian's website.

Errors

Some deep learning architectures display problematic behaviors, such as confidently classifying unrecognizable images as belonging to a familiar category of ordinary images (2014) and misclassifying minuscule perturbations of correctly classified images (2013). Goertzel hypothesized that these behaviors are due to limitations in their internal representations and that these limitations would inhibit integration into heterogeneous multi-component artificial general intelligence (AGI) architectures. These issues may possibly be addressed by deep learning architectures that internally form states homologous to image-grammar decompositions of observed entities and events. Learning a grammar (visual or linguistic) from training data would be equivalent to restricting the system to commonsense reasoning that operates on concepts in terms of grammatical production rules and is a basic goal of both human language acquisition and artificial intelligence (AI).

Cyber threat

As deep learning moves from the lab into the world, research and experience show that artificial neural networks are vulnerable to hacks and deception. By identifying patterns that these systems use to function, attackers can modify inputs to ANNs in such a way that the ANN finds a match that human observers would not recognize. For example, an attacker can make subtle changes to an image such that the ANN finds a match even though the image looks to a human nothing like the search target. Such manipulation is termed an “adversarial attack.”

In 2016 researchers used one ANN to doctor images in trial and error fashion, identify another's focal points and thereby generate images that deceived it. The modified images looked no different to human eyes. Another group showed that printouts of doctored images then photographed successfully tricked an image classification system. One defense is reverse image search, in which a possible fake image is submitted to a site such as TinEye that can then find other instances of it. A refinement is to search using only parts of the image, to identify images from which that piece may have been taken.

Another group showed that certain psychedelic spectacles could fool a facial recognition system into thinking ordinary people were celebrities, potentially allowing one person to impersonate another. In 2017 researchers added stickers to stop signs and caused an ANN to misclassify them.

ANNs can however be further trained to detect attempts at deception, potentially leading attackers and defenders into an arms race similar to the kind that already defines the malware defense industry. ANNs have been trained to defeat ANN-based anti-malware software by repeatedly attacking a defense with malware that was continually altered by a genetic algorithm until it tricked the anti-malware while retaining its ability to damage the target.

In 2016, another group demonstrated that certain sounds could make the Google Now voice command system open a particular web address, and hypothesized that this could "serve as a stepping stone for further attacks (e.g., opening a web page hosting drive-by malware)."

In “data poisoning,” false data is continually smuggled into a machine learning system's training set to prevent it from achieving mastery.

Reliance on human microwork

Most Deep Learning systems rely on training and verification data that is generated and/or annotated by humans. It has been argued in media philosophy that not only low-paid clickwork (e.g. on Amazon Mechanical Turk) is regularly deployed for this purpose, but also implicit forms of human microwork that are often not recognized as such. The philosopher Rainer Mühlhoff distinguishes five types of "machinic capture" of human microwork to generate training data: (1) gamification (the embedding of annotation or computation tasks in the flow of a game), (2) "trapping and tracking" (e.g. CAPTCHAs for image recognition or click-tracking on Google search results pages), (3) exploitation of social motivations (e.g. tagging faces on Facebook to obtain labeled facial images), (4) information mining (e.g. by leveraging quantified-self devices such as activity trackers) and (5) clickwork.

Mühlhoff argues that in most commercial end-user applications of Deep Learning such as Facebook's face recognition system, the need for training data does not stop once an ANN is trained. Rather, there is a continued demand for human-generated verification data to constantly calibrate and update the ANN. For this purpose Facebook introduced the feature that once a user is automatically recognized in an image, they receive a notification. They can choose whether of not they like to be publicly labeled on the image, or tell Facebook that it is not them in the picture. This user interface is a mechanism to generate "a constant stream of verification data" to further train the network in real-time. As Mühlhoff argues, involvement of human users to generate training and verification data is so typical for most commercial end-user applications of Deep Learning that such systems may be referred to as "human-aided artificial intelligence".

American Jews in politics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Many early German-Jewish immigrants to the United States tended to be politically conservative, but the wave of Eastern European Jews, starting in the early 1880s, were generally more liberal or left-wing, and eventually became the political majority. Many of the latter moved to America having had experience in the socialist, anarchist, and communist movements as well as the Labor Bund emanating from Eastern Europe. Many Jews rose to leadership positions in the early 20th century American labor movement, and founded unions that played a major role in left-wing politics and, after 1936, inside the Democratic Party politics. For most of the 20th century since 1936, the vast majority of Jews in the United States have been aligned with the Democratic Party. During the 20th and 21st centuries, the Republican Party has launched initiatives to persuade American Jews to support their political policies, with relatively little success.

Over the past century, Jews in Europe and the Americas have traditionally tended towards the political left, and played key roles in the birth of the labor movement as well as socialism. While Diaspora Jews have also been represented in the conservative side of the political spectrum, even politically conservative Jews have tended to support pluralism more consistently than many other elements of the political right.

The divide between right and left correlates to the various religious movements among American Jews. The more socially conservative movements in American Judaism (the Orthodox movement and various haredi sects, though not the Conservative movement) tend to be politically conservative, while the more socially liberal movements (Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist) tend to be more politically liberal or left-leaning as well.

There are also a number of Jewish secular organizations at the local, national, and international levels. These organizations often play an important part in the Jewish community. Most of the largest groups, such as Hadassah and the United Jewish Communities, have an elected leadership. No one secular group represents the entire Jewish community, and there is often significant internal debate among Jews about the stances these organizations take on affairs dealing with the Jewish community as a whole, such as anti-Semitism and policies regarding Israel. In the United States and Canada today, the mainly secular United Jewish Communities (UJC), formerly known as the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), represents over 150 Jewish Federations and 400 independent communities across North America. Every major American city has its local "Jewish Federation", and many have sophisticated community centers and provide services, mainly health care-related. They raise record sums of money for philanthropic and humanitarian causes in North America and Israel. Other organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Congress, American Jewish Committee, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Zionist Organization of America, Americans for a Safe Israel, B'nai B'rith, and Agudath Israel represent different segments of the American Jewish community on a variety of issues.

Progressive movement

Two girls wearing banners with the slogan "ABOLISH CHILD SLAVERY!!" in English and Yiddish. Likely taken during the May 1, 1909 labor parade in New York City.

With the influx of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe many members of the Jewish community were attracted to labor and socialist movements and numerous Jewish newspapers such as Forwerts and Morgen Freiheit had a socialist or communist orientation. Left wing organizations such as the Arbeter Ring and the Jewish People's Fraternal Order played an important part in Jewish community life until World War II.

Jewish Americans were involved in many important social movements, being in the forefront of promoting such issues as workers rights, civil rights, woman's rights, gay rights, freedom of religion, freedom from religion, peace movements, and various other left-wing and progressive causes.

Presidential elections

Although American Jews were fairly Republican in the second half of the 19th century, the majority have voted Democratic since at least 1916, voting at 55% for Woodrow Wilson. In 1940 and 1944, 90% of American Jews voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt, and 75% voted for Harry S. Truman in 1948, despite both party platforms supporting the creation of a Jewish state in the latter two elections. During the 1952 and 1956 elections, they voted 60% or more for Adlai Stevenson, while Dwight Eisenhower garnered 40% of their vote for his reelection; the best showing to date for the Republicans since Harding's 43% in 1920. In 1960, 83% voted for the Democrat John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic presidential candidate, against Richard Nixon, and in 1964, 90% of American Jews voted for Lyndon Johnson against his Republican opponent Barry Goldwater, who was a Protestant with Jewish roots. Hubert Humphrey garnered 81% of the Jewish vote in the 1968 election, in his losing bid for president against Richard Nixon.

During the Nixon re-election campaign of 1972, Jewish voters were relatively apprehensive about George McGovern, and only favored the Democrat by 65%, while Nixon more than doubled Jewish support for Republicans to 35%. In the election of 1976, Jewish voters supported the Democrat Jimmy Carter by 71% over the incumbent president Gerald Ford's 27%, but during the Carter re-election campaign of 1980, Jewish votes for the Democrat became relatively lower, with 45% support, with Republican election winner Ronald Reagan garnering 39%, and 14% going to the independent candidate John Anderson.

During the Reagan re-election campaign of 1984 he retained 31% of the Jewish vote, while 67% went to the Democrat Walter Mondale. The 1988 election saw Jewish voters favor the Democrat Michael Dukakis by 64%, while George H W Bush polled at 35%, though during his re-election in 1992 his Jewish support fell to 11%, with 80% voting for Bill Clinton and 9% going to the independent candidate Ross Perot. Clinton's re-election campaign in 1996 maintained high Jewish support at 78%, with 16% supporting Robert Dole and 3% for Perot.

The elections of 2000 and 2004 saw continued Jewish support for Democrats Al Gore and John Kerry, another Catholic candidate, remain in the high- to mid-70% range, while Republican George W Bush's re-election in 2004 saw Jewish support rise from 19% to 24%. In the 2000 presidential election, Joe Lieberman became the first Jewish American to run for national office on a major party ticket when he was chosen to be the vice-presidential nominee to the Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore.

In the 2008 presidential election, 78% of Jews voted for the Democratic nominee Barack Obama, who became the first African-American to be elected president. Polls indicated that during this election, 83% of white Jews voted for Obama compared to 34% of white Protestants and 47% of white Catholics, though 67% of whites identifying with another religion and 71% identifying with no religion also voted for Obama. In the 2012 presidential election, 68% of Jews voted for Barack Obama's re-election.

In the 2016 Election, 71% of Jews voted for the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton over the eventual winner Donald Trump. In a 2018 poll, 71% of American Jews disapproved of Donald Trump's job as president, with only 26% approving—being the lowest approving religious group among those surveyed.

Of the 2016 and 2020 presidential candidates, many front runners were either married to Jews, had children who were married to Jews, or were Jewish themselves. Presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Michael Bloomberg, and Marianne Williamson are Jewish. Michael Bennet's mother is Jewish. Beto O'Rourke and Kamala Harris are married to Jews. Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism and married the Jewish real estate developer Jared Kushner. Both were active in Trump's administration. Bill and Hillary Clinton's daughter Chelsea Clinton married the Jewish investor Marc Mezvinsky, the son of U.S. Representative and felon Edward Mezvinsky. Lastly, all three of Joe Biden's children who lived into adulthood married Jews.

United States Congress

For Congressional and Senate races, since 1968, American Jews have voted about 70–80% for Democrats; this support increased to 87% for Democratic House candidates during the 2006 elections. Currently, there are 10 Jews among the 100 U.S. Senators: 9 Democrats (Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Ben Cardin, Dianne Feinstein, Brian Schatz, Chuck Schumer, Ron Wyden, Jacky Rosen and Jon Ossoff), and one of the Senate's two independents, (Bernie Sanders, who caucuses with the Democrats as well).

There are 26 Jews among the 435 U.S. Representatives, all of whom are currently Democrats, except for Lee Zeldin of New York and David Kustoff of Tennessee.

Civil rights

During the American Civil War, American Jews were divided on their views regarding slavery and abolition. Prior to 1861, there were virtually no rabbinical sermons on slavery. The silence on this issue was probably a result of fear that the controversy would create conflict within the Jewish community due to its relative popularity at the time, though some Jews did come to play a role in the ending of slavery. Some Jews owned slaves or traded them, and the livelihoods of many in the Jewish community of both the North and South were tied to the slave system. Most southern Jews supported slavery, and some, like Judah P. Benjamin, advocated its expansion. The abolitionist Ben Wade, who knew Benjamin in the U.S. Senate, described him as "an Israelite with Egyptian principles". Northern Jews sympathized with the South, and very few were abolitionists, seeking peace and remaining silent on the subject of slavery. America's largest Jewish community in New York was "overwhelmingly pro-southern, pro-slavery, and anti-Lincoln in the early years of the war". However, eventually, they began to lean politically toward "Father Abraham", his Republican party, and emancipation.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, many American Jews became very active in fighting societal prejudice and discrimination, and have historically been active participants in movements for civil rights, including active support of and participation in the Civil Rights Movement, active support of and participation in the labor rights movement, and active support of and participation in the women's rights movement.

Seymour Siegel suggests that the historic struggle against prejudice faced by Jews led to a natural sympathy for any people confronting discrimination. Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, stated the following when he spoke from the podium at the Lincoln Memorial during the famous March on Washington on August 28, 1963: "As Jews, we bring to this great demonstration, in which thousands of us proudly participate, a twofold experience - one of the spirit and one of our history ... From our Jewish historic experience of three and a half thousand years, we say: Our ancient history began with slavery and the yearning for freedom. During the Middle Ages, my people lived for a thousand years in the ghettos of Europe ... It is for these reasons that it is not merely sympathy and compassion for the black people of America that motivates us. It is, above all and beyond all such sympathies and emotions, a sense of complete identification and solidarity born of our own painful historic experience."

International affairs

D-Day services at Congregation Emunath Israel on West Twenty-third Street, New York City

American Jews (and Jews worldwide) began taking a special interest in international affairs in the early twentieth century, especially regarding their co-religionists persecution during pogroms in Imperial Russia, and later, regarding increasing restrictions on immigration in the 1920s. This period was also synchronous with the development of political Zionism, as well as the Balfour Declaration, which gave Zionism its first official recognition.

During the 1930s, large-scale boycotts of German merchandise were organized; this period was synchronous with the rise of Fascism in Europe. Franklin D. Roosevelt's leftist domestic policies received strong Jewish support in the 1930s and 1940s, as did his foreign policies and the subsequent founding of the United Nations. Support for political Zionism in this period, although growing in influence, remained a distinctly minority opinion. The founding of Israel in 1948 made the Middle East a center of attention; the immediate recognition of Israel by the American government was an indication of both its intrinsic support and the influence of political Zionism.

This attention initially was based on a natural and religious affinity toward, and support for, Israel and world Jewry. The attention is also because of the ensuing and unresolved conflicts regarding the founding Israel and Zionism itself. A lively internal debate commenced, following the Six-Day War. The American Jewish community was divided over whether or not they agreed with the Israeli response; the great majority came to accept the war as necessary. A tension existed especially for leftist Jews, between their liberal ideology and (rightist) Zionist backing in the midst of this conflict. This deliberation about the Six-Day War showed the depth and complexity of Jewish responses to the varied events of the 1960s. Similar tensions were aroused by the 1977 election of Begin and the rise of revisionist policies, the 1982 Lebanon War, and the continuing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Disagreement over Israel's 1993 acceptance of the Oslo Accords caused a further split among American Jews; This mirrored a similar split among Israelis, and led to a parallel rift within the pro-Israel lobby.

A 2004 poll indicated that a majority of Jewish Americans favored the creation of an independent Palestinian state and believed that Israel should remove some or all of its settlements from the West Bank. Even though some felt that Israeli security was among the motivations for American intervention in Iraq, Jews were less supportive of the Iraq War than Americans as a whole. At the beginning of the conflict, Arab Americans were more supportive of the Iraq War than American Jews were (although both groups were less supportive of it than the general population).

Because of the emotional connection many Jews have for Israel, the issue has generated strong passions among both left-wing and right-wing Jews. There is a significant Jewish presence in the disparate political movement known as the "liberal hawks" or the pro-war Left, which, while strongly committed to liberal or leftist social domestic policy, also supports a liberal interventionist, hawkish or right-wing pro-Israel foreign policy for the United States. (Examples include Joe Lieberman, Christopher Hitchens, many of the contributors to Dissent magazine, and many of the signatories of the Euston Manifesto.) At the same time, there is a significant Jewish presence in the pro-Palestinian movement, including Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Butler.

The "Israel lobby" is the diverse coalition of groups and individuals seeking to influence the foreign policy of the United States in support of Zionism, Israel or the specific policies of its elected government. These organizations have included political, secular, and religious groups of Jewish-Americans, as well as non-Jewish organizations of political, secular, and religious Christian Americans. These groups have reportedly increased in size and influence over the years. The term itself has been subject to debate and criticism over the years, concerning its clarity and exact definition.

Jews are divided in their opinion of Trump's handling of the Israel Palestine conflict.

Contemporary politics

Today, American Jews are a distinctive and influential group in the nation's politics. Jeffrey S. Helmreich writes that the ability of American Jews to affect this through political or financial clout is overestimated, and that the primary influence lies in the group's voting patterns.

According to a 2017 survey, fifty-four percent of Orthodox Jews say they voted for Trump, according to a new survey by the American Jewish Committee, or AJC. That was well above 24 percent of Conservative Jews, 10 percent of Reform Jews, 8 percent of Reconstructionist Jews and 14 percent of respondents who identify themselves as “just Jewish.”

"Jews have devoted themselves to politics with almost religious fervor", writes Mitchell Bard, who adds that Jews have the highest percentage voter turnout of any ethnic group. While 2–2.5% of the United States population is Jewish, 94% live in 13 key electoral college states, which combined have enough electors to elect the president. Though the majority (60–70%) of the country's Jews identify as Democratic, Jews span the political spectrum, and Helmreich describes them as "a uniquely swayable bloc" as a result of Republican stances on Israel. A paper by Dr. Eric Uslaner of the University of Maryland disagrees, at least with regard to the 2004 election: "Only 15% of Jews said that Israel was a key voting issue. Among those voters, 55% voted for Kerry (compared to 83% of Jewish voters not concerned with Israel)." The paper goes on to point out that negative views of Evangelical Christians had a distinctly negative impact for Republicans among Jewish voters, while Orthodox Jews, traditionally more conservative in outlook as to social issues, favored the Republican Party. A New York Times article suggests that this movement of Jewish voters to the Republican party is focused heavily on faith-based issues, similar to the Catholic vote, which is credited for helping President Bush taking Florida in 2004.

Though critics have charged that Jewish interests were partially responsible for the push to war with Iraq, Jewish Americans were actually more strongly opposed to the Iraq War than any other major religious group or even most Americans. As noted above, they were even more opposed than Arab Americans. The greater opposition to the war is not simply a result of high Democratic identification among U.S. Jews, as Jews of all political persuasions are more likely to oppose the war than non-Jews who share the same political leanings. The widespread Jewish opposition to the war in Iraq is also not simply a matter of the majority of Americans now also opposing the war because the majority of Jews already opposed the war in 2003 and 2004 when most Americans did not.

Owing to high Democratic identification in the 2008 United States presidential election, 78% of Jews voted for Democrat Barack Obama, versus 21% for Republican John McCain, despite Republican attempts to connect Obama to Muslim and pro-Palestinian causes. It has been suggested that running mate Sarah Palin's outspoken conservative views on social issues may have nudged Jews away from the McCain-Palin ticket. Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, is Jewish, as is his former Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel.

Homophobia isn't kosher, San Francisco Pride 2013

American Jews are largely supportive of gay rights, though a split exists within the group by observance. Reform and Reconstructionist Jews are far more supportive on issues like gay marriage than Orthodox Jews are. A 2007 survey of Conservative Jewish leaders and activists showed that an overwhelming majority now supports gay rabbinical ordination and same-sex marriage. Accordingly, 78% percent of Jewish voters rejected Proposition 8, the bill which banned gay marriage in California. No other ethnic or religious group voted as strongly against it.

Jews in America also overwhelmingly oppose current United States marijuana policy. 86% of Jewish Americans opposed arresting non-violent marijuana smokers, compared to 61% for the population at large and 68% of all Democrats. Additionally, 85% of Jews in the United States opposed using federal law enforcement to close patient cooperatives for medical marijuana in states where medical marijuana is legal, compared to 67% of the population at large and 73% of Democrats.

In the 2012 presidential election, support for Democrats fell by 9 percentage, while support for Republicans increased by the same percentage. The American Jewish vote for President Barack Obama fell from 78 percent to 69 percent in 2012. Obama's opponent in 2008, John McCain, received the support of 21 percent of Jewish, whereas Mitt Romney increased that share to 30 percent in 2012.

Israelis favored Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney over Barack Obama in the 2012 United States presidential election by a 57 percent to 22 percent margin.

Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire Democratic primary on February 9, 2016, by 22.4% of the vote (60.4% to Hillary Clinton's 38.0%). "Sanders, a self-identified democratic socialist, has repeatedly described himself as a secular Jew. ... " (Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, was the first winner of Jewish heritage, but was a Christian).

In the 2018 midterms, Jews were again the most Democratic group as designated by religious identity, with 79% voting for the Democrats while 17% voted for the Republicans.

Education

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education Education is the transmissio...